Aug 23 2000
From The Space Library
Russian space officials announced a decision to alter plans for the Enterprise module of the ISS, which the company RSC Energia was building in conjunction with the U.S. company SPACEHAB. In the original plans, the module had been noncommercial, providing docking and cargo space, but in an effort to increase revenue, RSC Energia had revised the plans to allow the module to hold multimedia equipment for various business projects.
Lockheed Martin Systems Integration announced that the U.S. Navy had selected the company to build seven SH-60R Multi-Mission Helicopters, under the first SH-60R low-rate initial production (LRIP) contract, moving Lockheed Martin from development and testing to the production phase of the SH-60R program. The contract required Lockheed Martin to integrate the flight avionics systems, mission avionics systems, and stores and defense systems.
NASA announced the results of the most complete HST census of brown dwarfs, finding that the "odd and elusive objects also tend to be loners." Joan Najita of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona explained that the properties of brown dwarfs "reveal new and unique insights into how stars and planets form," because they "bridge the gap between stars and planets." The stellar objects are too low in mass to burn hydrogen, yet are more massive than planets; despite being 15 to 80 times more massive than Jupiter, brown dwarfs are difficult to detect because the light they emit is very faint. The HST census had found more low-mass than high-mass brown dwarfs, as is the case with stars, and the isolated brown dwarfs appeared to represent the low-mass counterparts of the more massive classes of stars. In carrying out the census, scientists had used the HST's infrared vision to measure the brightness and temperature of stars in the cluster IC 348 in the constellation Perseus. Najita and colleagues had used the telescope's NICMOS camera, developing a new technique to distinguish brown dwarfs from "the clutter of background stars." The new procedure had measured the "strength of an infrared water-absorption band in the atmospheres of the stars," a sensitive measure of each star's temperature, solving several problems simultaneously. The procedure had enabled the scientists to distinguish the brown dwarfs from background stars and to measure the masses of the brown dwarfs without needing to assume their ages, thereby greatly improving estimates of mass.
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